The Clock Is Ticking: What Developers Have Planned for Apple Watch

When the Apple Watch launches early next year, it will boast applications that let you pay for products, check the weather, find your car (if that car is a BMW) and unlock your hotel door (if that hotel is Starwood). It will have apps from Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest that let you do some — but not all — of what you already do on your iPhone or iPad.

What appears to be missing from the Apple Watch right now, as one analyst put it after Apple's big event on Tuesday, is a "killer app." The kind of app that's more than just a tinier facsimile of what you might find on a larger screen.

Apple certainly wouldn't put it that way, but the company did suggest that the ball is now in the developers' court to produce those killer apps. "Developers create things that do things we never imaged were possible," Kevin Lynch, former CTO of Adobe and now a VP at Apple overseeing the Watch efforts, said during the event. "We think there's a great opportunity now on Apple Watch for them."

Developers, as it turns out, don't need to be told twice. Many have been waiting and wondering for weeks, if not months, about how Apple's first wearable device would work and what it might mean for their applications. Some, like Francisco Inchauste, ignored other opportunities during that long wait.

"We were waiting for this over anything else," says Inchauste, cofounder of Simplebots, which developed the popular alarm clock application Rise. His startup gave serious thought to developing for Android, but decided to conserve its resources for Apple's watch, if and when the device was released. Now that the watch is out, his mind is racing with ideas for what to do with it.

"We are very interested in the potential with the health and activity data aspects that HealthKit and the Apple Watch open up," Inchauste says. "Sleep is obviously a key part of health and people using Rise could benefit from this. It could mean sending the data in Rise to help track sleep, or triggering things when they wake up."

Other startups who did begin the process of building for smartwatches already on the market now plan to shift resources to focus more on the Apple Watch.

"We've developed for Pebble, we've developed for the Galaxy [Gear], we've developed for Sony," says Matt Galligan, cofounder and CEO of Circa, a mobile-focused news service. "Going forward, we are going to be focusing on Android Wear and Apple Watch."

The moment he saw the product demo, Galligan began imaging how the user might feel a buzz on the watch whenever there is a breaking news alert and then tap "follow" through a Circa app. "Within a few weeks we will really start knocking it out," he said.

Hey, you remember that time where everyone called the iPad a big iPhone and said no one would buy it and it was useless?

MyFitnessPal hopes to develop an application for the Apple Watch that takes advantage of the extra data from the wearable device. Lima Sky, the company behind the Doodle Jump games, sees an opportunity to develop simpler but fun games that can be played on the smaller screen. And Yo, the app for sending messages that simply say "yo," plans to build an app that creates a cross-platform notification experience.

Even bigger startups are eagerly anticipating the possibilities with Apple Watch. Evernote, one of the first apps to take off on the iPhone, has developed smartphone applications before, but it sees the new device as a different ballgame entirely.

"When you are developing for the Apple Watch, you are developing for a mainstream product. You are developing something that is meant to appeal to hundreds of millions of users," says Phil Libin, Evernote's CEO. "Developing for previous smart watches means developing for nerds."

The real potential, according to Libin, will be developing an application for the watch that "uses all of your devices at the same time." As he puts it, the Apple smart watch will usher in a new "single session, multiple device" paradigm for apps.

Most of the startups we spoke with stressed the same point, though: Time is of the essence.

"There's definitely an advantage of being first on the platform," says Igor Pusenjak, the co-creator of Doodle Jump. "We’ve experienced that and benefitted from that on the iPhone for sure. We were kind of a bit late to the game on the iPad and we’re seeing the effect of that. So we certainly want to be among the first ones on the watch."

Editor's note: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore's personal investment in Yo in no way influences the decisions of editorial coverage or analysis.

Apple Watch Apps

Apple Watch Apps

The Apple Watch will come with a range of built-in apps, with the option to download third party apps.

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